Standard Bank Brand Guidelines: A London-Born Bank That Opened in a Gold-Rush Tent

A London company, a Cape port and a gold-rush tent.

Standard Bank’s story starts in London. In 1862 a group of businessmen led by the politician John Paterson formed the Standard Bank of British South Africa there, and it began trading in 1863 in Port Elizabeth, now Gqeberha, English Wikipedia says. Soon after opening it absorbed several local banks, among them the Commercial Bank of Port Elizabeth, the Colesberg Bank and the Fauresmith Bank.

The bank followed the mineral discoveries of the following decades. It helped finance the Kimberley diamond fields from 1867, dropped “British” from its name in 1883, and on 11 October 1886 opened for business in a tent at Ferreira’s Camp, the settlement that became Johannesburg; English Wikipedia describes it as the first bank to open a branch on the Witwatersrand gold fields. A second Johannesburg branch, on Eloff Street, followed in 1901.

For a century it was a British overseas bank with African operations. In 1962 the South African business became a subsidiary and took the name The Standard Bank of South Africa, while the London parent became Standard Bank Limited; shares in the South African bank were offered to the public in 1967. In 1969 the London parent merged with the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China to form Standard Chartered, and the Standard Bank Investment Corporation, today’s Standard Bank Group, was set up as the South African holding company. Standard Chartered reduced its holding through the 1970s and 1980s and sold its remaining 39% in 1987, leaving the group in South African hands, with the insurer Liberty Life as its main shareholder until 1999, according to English Wikipedia.

Stanbic, ICBC and a continent of subsidiaries.

The split from Standard Chartered gave the group its second name. When it bought the African operations of ANZ Grindlays Bank in eight countries in 1992, it renamed most of them Stanbic Bank to avoid confusion with its former parent, which still traded in Africa, English Wikipedia says. Later purchases took the same name: the Tanzanian business of Meridien BIAO in 1995, 90% of Uganda Commercial Bank in 2002, and a controlling interest in Nigeria’s IBTC Chartered Bank in 2007, which became Stanbic IBTC. Some subsidiaries are old in their own right: Standard Bank Namibia traces its first branch, in Lüderitz, to 19 August 1915, and Standard Bank Eswatini opened in 1988, English Wikipedia says. The group now trades as Stanbic in markets including Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda, and as Standard Bank in others such as Namibia, Malawi and Mozambique.

In October 2007 the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) agreed to buy 20% of Standard Bank, half through new shares and half from existing holders, with the right to two seats on its board, the Mail & Guardian reported; ICBC described Standard Bank as Africa’s biggest banking group by assets. In February 2008 the paper reported that Chinese regulators had approved the purchase, after Standard Bank’s shareholders and South African regulators had already done so. English Wikipedia records ICBC as holding a stake of about 20%.

The group has also sold businesses abroad. In Argentina, where it bought BankBoston’s unit in 2006, ICBC acquired 80% in 2012, and the group cut its stake in the Turkish firm Standard Ünlü to 25% the same year, English Wikipedia says. In January 2014 Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority fined Standard Bank PLC over shortcomings in its anti-money-laundering controls for corporate customers linked to politically exposed persons between 2007 and 2011, according to the same source.

At home the brand has moved into payments. In 2013 it partnered with the Cape Town fintech Firepay to launch the SnapScan QR-code payment app, and in 2016 it took a majority stake in Firepay, saying the app would stay open to other banks’ customers. In 2019 it moved its operations onto Amazon Web Services, and in March of that year it announced the closure of 91 branches, citing customers’ growing use of self-service channels, English Wikipedia says.

How African banks present themselves.

African banks speak to very different audiences at once: city professionals and market traders, multinational companies and small farms, customers with a branch on the corner and customers whose nearest branch is a long journey away. Their identities tend to reflect that range. Bold geometric marks, simple enough to read on a branch sign, a card or a phone screen, sit alongside palettes built on strong blues, reds and greens.

Photography carries much of the message. Annual reports and campaign pages often pair city skylines with everyday customers photographed across the continent, from shop owners and farmers to students and young families. Many groups also publish footprint maps that show where they operate, a visual shorthand for a pan-African presence that may run through subsidiaries trading under different local names.

Digital channels have become a central part of the brand. Bank websites give prominent space to mobile apps and to USSD menus, the short dial codes that work on basic phones without data, alongside pages for small-business banking and agriculture lending programmes. The tone on these pages is usually practical, written to explain how to open an account, send money or apply for credit.

Reporting is the other half of the identity. Large banking groups publish integrated, sustainability and financial-inclusion reports, and these documents often carry the most considered typography and photography a bank produces. This guide looks at each brand’s history and what can be checked about how it presents itself, and treats the colours and type shown here as an unofficial interpretation rather than official brand assets.

One group, two names across Africa.

Standard Bank Group is headquartered at Standard Bank Centre in Johannesburg and, in 2024, was present in more than 20 sub-Saharan African countries, English Wikipedia says. Alongside retail banking in South Africa it runs corporate and investment banking across the continent. The bank says Brand Finance’s South Africa Top 100 Brands report for 2025 ranked it the country’s most valuable banking brand for a fourth year in a row.

Its history gives the brand an unusual shape: a name chosen in London, a first branch in a Cape port, a tent in a gold-rush camp, and a second name, Stanbic, adopted in the 1990s so that it could be told apart from Standard Chartered, the bank its own former parent became. When the ICBC agreement was announced in 2007, the Mail & Guardian reported that Standard Bank operated in 18 African countries and 21 others.

For a design guide, Standard Bank shows how a bank can carry two names across a continent: Standard Bank in some markets and Stanbic in others. Compare Standard Chartered, the bank its London parent became in 1969, and FirstRand, another Johannesburg banking group with nineteenth-century roots. For this guide we use a deep navy, a bright blue and a warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Standard Bank’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.